Call for Papers

As Titan approaches northern summer solstice in 2017, seasonal variations in solar insolation are driving dynamic changes to its surface and atmosphere. A primary objective of the Cassini Solstice Mission is to study these changes and monitor the evolution of Titan’s hydrocarbon-based hydrologic cycle.

The year 2014 marks the tenth year of operations of the NASA/ESA Cassini orbiter at Saturn, a period which has seen a tremendous increase in our knowledge of the planet’s ring system. As a result, previous theoretical models have been challenged or revised, and many new questions raised. In August 2014, the Fourth Planetary Rings Workshop was held in Boulder, CO, sponsored by the Cassini Rings Working Group. This special issue brings together papers presented at the meeting, but is also open to other contributions describing new observational or theoretical work on this topic.

In the past five years, the paradigm of lunar volatiles research has shifted from hypothesizing on the existence of volatiles on the Moon to classifying the abundance and distribution of different types of volatiles on the Moon. This special issue reports work advancing the understanding of volatiles in, on, and around the Moon including the primordial inventory, volatile additions and losses throughout the history of the Moon, and the current inventory of volatiles.

In April and May 2013 the Cassini spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope, and a number of ground-based telescopes undertook an unprecedented observing campaign to study the aurora of Saturn, forming the most comprehensive set of remote and in-situ observations of this spectacular interaction between the planet’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and solar wind.